Bruno Waterfield has been the Brussels correspondent for the Telegraph since 2007. He has been reporting on politics and European affairs for over 13 years, first from Westminster and then from Brussels since January 2003.

The Council of the EU is institution that organises the regular meetings of ministers and the summits of European leaders.

With an EU summit in full swing it’s a bit difficult to see the impact of the strike although a national European affairs minister told me that it meant the foreign minister of Montenegro got served a still-frozen bit of fish for lunch yesterday.

Journalists, never good people to annoy, have been hit with late arrivals for summit passes (including at least two national British newspapers) being delayed for over three hours due to the industrial action.

'No more scapegoating,' a striker puts up posters. Coreper is the committee of EU ambassadors that wants deeper cuts that Brussels lawyers don't like

The EU civil servants – most of whom are secretaries and clerks rather than the smug, preachy highly paid Eurocrats we love to hate – are under pressure to absorb the kinds of cuts their national brothers and sisters are being hit with.

Let’s make some comparisons.

The Commission on Wednesday published its draft EU budget for 2014 with spending reduced from €144.5 billion (£123bn) in 2013 to €135.9bn next year, a cut of 5.8 per cent.

That includes a 7.2 per cent increase to fund 70 per cent of final salary pensions for EU officials, a cost governments want to cut, one of the causes of the strike.

Among the increases is a 3.2 per cent rise in the cost of Baroness Ashton’s External Action Service, despite her promise to run it as “budget neutral”. Britain’s Foreign Office by contrast, faces an eight per cent cut.

The seemingly inexorable increases in the cost of the EU’s bureaucracy go in the opposite direction to deep cuts in the cost of the public sector in Britain, announced by George Osborne, the Chancellor on Wednesday.

He announced the loss of 144,000 jobs in the civil service with cuts to Government departments ranging from eight to 10 per cent while the EU bureaucracy continues to grow, both in size and cost.

Negotiations continue with EU ambassadors on reform to the pay and conditions for European civil servants on Friday. Countries, including Britain and Germany, want to cut perks such as that enjoyed by two thirds of EU officials who cash in on an expat perk that gives them an extra 16 per cent on top of their salary for their entire working life at a cost of £200 million a year.

Despite austerity across Europe, including savage measures imposed by the EU in eurozone countries such as Greece, Ireland, Portugal and Cyprus, no EU civil servant has lost their job due to the crisis.

There is a plan for a five per cent reduction in their numbers but through a freeze in the commission on new jobs rather than redundancies. Eurocrat job security is written into EU treaties.

I spoke to Didier Cossé, an executive board member of the Renouveau & Democracie trade union for European civil servants who works in the council of the EU. He accuses “egotist and selfish” countries (and I think he has Britain in mind) for undermining the EU via cuts.

“We are very worried about the constant weakening of the European civil service and the European project,” he said.

“The Lisbon Treaty gives more competences [this is slippery jBrussels jargon for 'powers'] civil servants at the same time they want to reduce our status.”

“It is completely false to compare us to national civil servants, a better comparison is with diplomats.”

Gunther Lorenz, the chairman of the Union Syndicale, added: “Here our tasks are much more important and difficult.”

To underline this unique status, the EU’s in-house lawyers have written secret advice warning that plans by David Cameron and other European leaders to even touch pay and perks for Brussels officials in line with national austerity measures "raise serious legal concerns".

As I wrote last month, lawyers in the European Commission and Council of the EU have warned that any "abrupt changes" to salaries or pensions would be illegal if reforms violated the "legitimate expectations" of officials. That seems to rule out any UK-style cuts to the EU civil service.